“You and your big, stupid, mouth!” Davi snarled. “It’ll be easy, he says! What could go wrong, he says!”

Byron and I were cutting her free of a pavemimic. The shadow of our pursuer flickered across her face as I grabbed her arm, pulling her back into motion. None of us spoke for a few moments until we’d put a few steps in between us and the thing we were calling the Monstrosity.

Seeing we’d gotten some distance back, I flashed a grin at Davi. “This is fine! We only need to keep it up a little longer. Then we can hop back in the truck and leave the Monstrosity here. We planned for this.”

“This is like… Plan J!” Davi shouted. “You really want to just leave this thing here? The next person who finds it is so dead.”

“Well… hopefully no one does. It’s pretty deserted here. Do you have a better idea?”

“No!”

The Monstrosity I was referring to was the massive bundle of pavemimics, which had stubbornly refused to separate. The singleton assaulting Davi had simply been sitting quiescent in the field nearby until she’d put her foot in it as we ran. We’d cleared a large area after we’d hopped out of the truck, killing all the spacedogs and stomping around to look for pavemimics, but I guess we’d missed one.

Before we’d started, I’d felt really prepared. Byron could throw Fire Bolts from one direction. Zephyr could hit the mass with Assisted Strike throws from another. I could also literally throw things to bring them a third way. Davi could even pop Force Shields into the middle to ensure any temporary separations in the group remained permanent.

It didn’t work at all.

If we hit the group simultaneously from three sides, it would stretch and contort toward all of us, but it wouldn’t separate, the monsters in the middle keeping a tight grip on their peripheral counterparts. After a moment, the Monstrosity would collapse back toward the center, and then surge off in a near-random direction… except that it seemed to guess where we were more often than random chance would indicate, even those of us who hadn’t poked at it recently. We tried a number of different tactics, but we got the same results every time.

We’d then tried leaving it alone for a while, hoping the Monstrosity would go dormant again if we stopped hitting it, like it had when the truck had stopped. After several minutes, we’d had to admit it wasn’t happening. Maybe it could differentiate between our attacks and the movement of the truck? Maybe it could sense vibrations and could detect our footsteps? That would explain why its random flailing so frequently moved it toward us.

That led us to our current predicament, attempting to implement… Plan H? Plan J? Davi had listed them all out, but her paper had remained behind in the semi cab. We were definitely not following it exactly. We were far, far, down our list of contingencies, that much was certain. Avalanche and JoeyT were watching Zephyr’s back while she used a sledgehammer and Assisted Strike to try to bash the padlock free of the truck’s doors. Byron, Davi, and I were doing our best to keep the Monstrosity from heading their way. We’d gotten it to follow us, and it mostly hadn’t been too hard to keep ahead of it, but the stray pavemimic had slowed us considerably, letting the Monstrosity get frighteningly close as we cut Davi free.

The Monstrosity seemed less like a collection of separate monsters and more like one insane goopy mass that fluctuated in size, color, and shape. Bits of it would press against the ground flatly enough to almost disappear, while other bits flung themselves skyward, rising ten feet up to smash together like the lips of a Venus flytrap before subsuming themselves into the writhing mass once more. Other tendrils threw themselves out from the mass, questing and searching, but it was impossible for me to tell what led the mass of monsters to head one way rather than the next.

It had gotten within ten feet as we’d pulled Davi free, but it was about twenty feet back now, and had started heading away. Byron hit it with another Fire Bolt, trying to keep it from turning toward the truck.

“If there were a dozen of me, I could just fry this thing,” he muttered. “Damnit, Vince! Why did I let you talk me into taking a third fire ability? Woo, I’m as strong as a single welding torch. What good is that?!”

“Well, you’ll be great at getting into the truck if TAF can’t manage it,” I said.

“Great. And how are you all going to keep the Monstrosity off me? I’m the only one with a real ranged ability except Twinkles and the healers!”

“I think… they’re inside,” Davi panted. “Shouldn’t need you.”

The clangs of Zephyr smashing the padlock had stopped a little bit ago, and now I heard the echoing crash of the trailer’s doors slamming closed. I glanced over to see Avalanche waving at us, one arm holding a load of water bottles.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“We’ve got them!” she called. “Let’s hit the road.”

“Finally,” Davi said.

We put on a burst of speed. Well, what my co-workers considered speed, anyway: I’d been having to make an effort not to outpace them this whole time. Even at their slower pace, they were still much faster than the Monstrosity, and we put about forty feet between us and it before we reached the truck cab.

“Go, go!” Davi screamed as she scrambled inside.

Avalanche had already taken her spot in the driver’s seat, and had gotten the wheel yanked to the side to turn. She hit the gas as soon as Byron had a foot on the running board, forcing him to grab onto the doorframe to keep from falling as the truck started rolling.

I held my breath as we motored around the corner, eyes locked to a rearview mirror, praying the Monstrosity wouldn’t reach the back of the trailer before we pulled away.

We made it, leaving the churning mass of monsters searching for us uselessly on an empty road.

That’s going to be a problem for someone, I thought. Hope they’re a bit stronger than we are by the time they find it.

In the back of the car, Bolero and John were already spraying water bottles into Twinkles’ gut, manhandling his slight frame to the side to let the dirty water and blood run out. It was gruesome to watch, and I was both glad and alarmed that Twinkles continued to sleep through it.

“I’ll give him all I’ve got,” John said. “You stay awake to keep the healing running.”

Bolero nodded and John sat down on the ground before putting a hand on Twinkles, ensuring that his tired collapse ran little risk of increasing the injuries our group had to deal with. The older man’s frame sagged as the cut started to scab over, but didn’t fully close.

Bolero sat down on the edge of the bunk, and I saw the scab grow another fraction, although the wound continued to ooze. The younger healer drummed his feet on the ground, bunching his fists into balls as he glared angrily at his friend’s sleeping form.

Must be hard to hold himself back from healing more, even if that’s the right move.

There was a bump as we ran over something, either a pothole or a pavemimic - who could tell?

“We should stop again,” I said. “We’ve gotten far enough away from the Monstrosity, and I’d prefer not to grow another. We can clear off the wheels, leave the doors open, air out the cab, and take a longer look in the back.”

JoeyT groaned. “We’ve been out here a little over an hour and we’ve made it… what… two miles? I guess it’s better time than we made walking.”

“We know what we’re doing now,” Davi said. “We’ll get faster.”

The stocky eSports player snorted. “And then the aliens will make it harder. Byron, you think there’ll be a new monster tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah.” Byron stretched, frowning. “It’s a shame, but I think Vince is right: we gotta stop. I hate to waste fuel holding still, but idling probably isn’t too costly, and we need to clear off the wheels again. Might be a net positive in fuel if we can dump a lot of the stuff in the trailer. I’m sure we’re hauling a lot of weight in kitchenware and shit. Plus, it’ll be easier to control this thing with Kurt awake.”

“At least one of us should stay in the trailer,” JoeyT said. “We’ve got three people asleep, Bolero needs to focus on Twinkles, and a spacedog can get in if we’re leaving the doors open.”

Bolero grimaced. “I need to put my physical energy toward Twinkles, but mentally? I could use a distraction. It’s hard as hell trying to space out my heals, especially without a watch. Let me know if you find any books or magazines back there.”

“Will do,” I said. “JoeyT, you staying?”

He shrugged. “I can, sure. Let me know what we’re ditching.”

…

It took the rest of us several hours to go through the trailer, and we ended up taking turns guarding the healers so JoeyT could pitch in and the rest of us could take breaks. The pallets were heavy and hard to move: even with the five of us, we couldn’t lift most of them, just shove them around. It was like doing a giant, exhausting slide puzzle.

I was surprised by how little of the truck was food. Even though food filled the majority of my family’s cart on a ValuCo trip, it made up only a third of the trailer’s cargo.

In retrospect, it made sense: none of the frozen or refrigerated goods would be shipped in a normal trailer like this. Heck, even the counter-stable things like vegetables probably wouldn’t hold up well to a day or two in hundred-degree heat. They were probably shipped in special trailers too. There was still plenty of food, but it was things like granola bars, cereal, pasta, rice, and canned goods. We had things to drink as well: in addition to the pallet of water bottles we’d spotted earlier, we had grape juice and some lemon-lime soda. It was all more valuable than gold, these days.

About half the trailer was filled with easy-to-jettison goods like dish detergent, lawn furniture, toys, appliances, and holiday decor.

The remainder started a few debates. For example, was it worth hauling around a full pallet of socks or fleece pajama pants? What about seasonings? They were edible, but didn’t really have any caloric value. What about batteries? We knew they worked, but we didn’t have any use for them at the moment, with all the machines that would use them broken. Should we keep them around for the future?

More of the decisions than I’d like to admit were based on how difficult it was to get things out of the truck. A handful of times, we ripped into pallets to grab a handful of items while jettisoning the rest. For example, I couldn’t convince everyone else that we needed a full pallet of seasoned salt, so I had to rescue a few jars for myself.

We didn’t find any books for Bolero. After he got Twinkles’ wound closed, he either made a misjudgement or had his patience run out, because by the time we finished, he was asleep.